PPC Bully

PPC Bully is an intelligence gathering tool for Google Adwords (as reviewed in 2010). It makes it possible to find existing winning campaigns and uncover all its keywords, ads and landing page.

It's available by subscription and is web based, so you don't need to install any software and you can access it with any computer that has internet access.

Rates for access to PPCBully vary, but it's not cheap. Expect to pay over $1,000 annually.

PPC Bully records keywords (broad match only) and the associated ads running on Adwords in either the US or UK markets. Essentially the tool allows you to spy on profitable Adwords campaigns. If a campaign has been running for weeks with expensive keywords (keywords that have a high CPC - cost per click), then it must be profitable, or the person running the campaign has endless funds, which is unlikely.

As a practical example, let's say you want to run a campaign for a weight loss product. Go to PPC Bully, type in the keyword 'weight loss', and a list of several thousand keywords pops up related to weight loss in which folks are bidding on in Adwords.

Click on any of the keywords in the list and you get a screen showing all the Adwords ads associated with that keyword, along with statistics such as keyword search volume, average cost per click, number of profitable ads versus number of total ads, number of direct linking affiliate ads, and time stamp of PPCBully's last scan of the keyword information. The keyword search volume and average cost per click values are taken directly from Google's keyword tool, which is notorious for inaccurate data.

With the click of a few buttons, you can instantly get weeks or months of historical data of the competition in your niche.